


perchance to dream

by SerenePanic



Series: VLD Angst Week 2017 [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 20:56:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10395900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerenePanic/pseuds/SerenePanic
Summary: Is it still insomnia if it's willing, if the only thing really keeping you awake is the fear of what you'll see if you sleep?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Hamlet. I think. It's Shakespeare, I know that.
> 
> Part of VLD Angst Week.
> 
> March 21st: Nightmares/Insomnia.

Hunk doesn’t want to sleep.

He should, he knows. And if he let himself try, he probably could fall asleep with relative ease—he’s yawning, and his head feels heavy and imbalanced. His ears feel distant and his fingers are tight with sleepiness. It would be so easy to just lay down, and close his eyes, and let himself sleep.

He doesn’t want to.

His stomach aches, faintly, and his chest feels like it’s being squeezed all around. He’s tired, yes, but when he thinks about putting the energy in to clear his mind enough to sleep, and then having to wake up in the morning and do it all over again, anyway?

He welcomes the ache in the center of his chest—the hollowness, the scraped-raw center, the burning flame that drips melted max onto his stomach, burning and cramping. It’s a familiar ache, an ever-present companion he barely has to think about to find.

His head feels like a sandbag, unbalanced and weighty and unstable. His chest, however, feels like embers, smoldering and just waiting to flare up.

He doesn’t want to surrender to sleep.

He’s scared that if he sleeps, he won’t get any rest, because his dreams will be filled with burning and death and loss, and his sleep is supposed to be his refuge from that. It’s better, then, to willingly chase sleep away then face the loss of a safe retreat. He’s already lost so much—his mothers, his home, his entire planet, his sense of community—he can’t bear to lose his dreams, too.

He can’t complain about this to anyone, though, because it’s a choice he makes. He could be asleep, right now. There’s nothing stopping him, not really. He’s sitting in his bed, half under his covers, totally ready to sleep, clutching at his arms and he worries his thumbs back and forth and back and forth. It doesn’t make his stomach hurt any less, but it does let him focus on something besides his buzzing head or his tingling toes or the faint nausea that’s making its way back.

He wants to sleep, but not like this.

He wants to sleep and wake up rested, after a good night’s sleep, content after hours of sweet dreams filled with friends and happy memories. He wants the worst part about it to be waking up and knowing it’ll be a while before he can go back to bed. He’s so tired of waking up and having waking up be the relief, the knowledge that it’s not too late yet, that nobody’s died and it wasn’t his fault.

Hunk’s been staring at the ceiling so long he doesn’t remember what the room looks like. It’s dark in his room, and it’s just a little too cold for him to comfortably sleep.

(All of space is too cold, there’s no sun, no warmth, and all he wants to do is hibernate until he can be really, truly warm again.)

He flexes his toes under the blanket, and feels them rub against each other and slide past—until they, too, are filled with that same lackluster ache of tiredness, and it takes too much energy to continue.

He yawns, and his face feels too tight.

He wants to claw his face off. He wants to run for miles. He wants to rip off his skin and just become someone new. He wants his chest to feel light, to not feel like he’s too far underwater. He wants to be able to breath and be at peace.

He wants to sleep and enjoy it.

He blinks, slowly and certainly. The clock he converted to Earth-time sits blinking in the corner, telling him he’s been staring at the wall for nearly an hour. His head still feels like molasses, and his brief period of manic energy is wearing off.

He’s so tired, but he’s too scared to sleep. He has nothing to fear from sleep, he knows, but he still doesn’t want to face it. He doesn’t want to see Shiro fall, to see Keith crash, to see Pidge freeze. He doesn’t want to see Lance leave. He doesn’t want to watch his mothers be taken by the Galra and killed. He doesn’t want to watch Earth fall. He doesn’t want to watch these people he cares about, his team his friends his _family_ lose and die.

He doesn’t mind the dreams where he dies, not really. Those suck, sure, but they’re not as bad, because at least it’s just him being hurt, and it never hurts, not really. He wakes up and his chest feels scraped raw, but that’s normal, and he wakes up before he actually ever dies, anyway. It’s not so bad, not really.

The awful ones are the ones where past events go differently, where he can’t change things, where the ones dying are people Hunk loves and yet still people he can’t help.

Hunk doesn’t want to sleep, not because he’s scared of dying, but because he’s scared of watching everyone else die and leave him alone.

He slides down in bed, so at the very least he’s not sitting up anymore.

He doesn’t see the point of any of this, really. Nobody’s going to notice that he didn’t sleep, or that he went to sleep absurdly late, and all that’s going to happen is that he’ll have a headache and be crabby and have more issues focusing than he normally does. Still, as he watches the clock tick slowly and steadily on, he desperately wishes that people would care, that they’d notice him moving a little bit slower than normal and watching him and talk to him because they care, and they know him well enough to know something is up. But he knows it won’t happen, and that he’s just sitting up, waiting for someone to need him, blinking slowly into a dark and heartless night.

His eyesight is trembling, now. He feels more alert than he has all night, and his fingers don’t feel as sluggish as they have for the past few days (weeks, months, he means).

It’s getting harder to keep his eyes open, but his stomach is tightening even more, and he’s so scared to sleep. His neck tenses, and his head shoots stabbing pains, and his throat burns, and his eyelids droop—but he’s fine. Everything is fine.

Time is passing faster than Hunk can process.

He needs to sleep. He turns over on his side and tries to close his eyes, but his stomach refuses to let him rest, unless he wants to accept the possibility of murder-dreams.

He should be getting up in a handful of hours, anyway. He might as well try, and hope that this time, it works and he doesn’t dream about the end of the world.

Hunk doesn’t want to sleep, but he’s too anxious to be awake anymore, so he forces himself to fall into the current and let sleep drown him, and hope his dreams will be better than his life.


End file.
